Feature manipulation in sentence comprehension

Agreement features participate in several grammatical dependencies such as subject-verb agreement and antecedent-reflexive binding. We explore whether there is any stage of sentence processing in which a linear structure-independent feature matching process occurs, e.g., as a means of identifying candidate antecedents which are then subject to further structural and semantic evaluation. Three self-paced reading studies fail to confirm the predictions of the structure-independent matching hypothesis. Turning to the question of how features are represented in the processing of filler-gap dependencies and subject verb dependencies, two incremental grammaticality judgment experiments suggest that number features are passed through the syntactic phrase-marker with some consequent confusion when a single link in the tree must transmit both a singular feature, transmitted between the subject and a local verb, and a plural feature, transmitted between the filler and a gap occurring after the local verb. However, if the fillergap path is terminated before the subject and local verb are encountered, then perceivers more accurately detect the violation in ungrammatical sentences where a singular subject is paired with a local plural verb. *